


Hope, help, resolve

by shai



Category: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, au for shura ending, spoilers for shura ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: Emma always did say she would want to kill a demon if one were to appear.The complicated part turns out to be what to do afterwards.





	1. Chapter 1

Emma fights the Divine Heir’s shinobi back and forth across the castle lookout's uneven floor. This wasn’t how she’d expected the day to end. This wasn't ever how she'd expected her promise to fight a demon to be put to the test.

She'd spent a pleasant hour or so in Kuro's library earlier, then a frustrating one convincing Isshin that yes his heart condition really did make it unwise to go stalking through the corners of their fiefdom incognito, and she'd been looking forward to a game of shogi before nightfall. True, they'd all been waiting for the hammer to fall on this desperate plan of theirs for the last few days, but she hadn’t expected a blow from this angle. The smart money had been on the Interior Ministry taking advantage of the trail of dead generals in the shinobi’s wake to launch their own assault, or on Kuro’s research hitting on some obscure diaster.

She'd really somehow trusted the amnesiac shinobi. At least in his loyalty to his lord. He'd always seemed too single-minded to betray his so-called young master.

Unfortunately he’d channelled all that singlemindedness into terrifying sword skills. Emma is not a woman given to backing down in the face of bad odds, but it shakes her to fight someone who lives to fight. She’s seen that same focus in Isshin’s eyes, but never had it turned on her in earnest. She only has one advantage here she can see: his face is sharp with hunger, and it makes him predictable. He’s as fast as her and fearless, but she can tell there's impatience in his eyes.

She thinks she can use it against him. Emma gives him what looks like an opening, waits for the moment he commits to a strike and skips back to put the light of the sun behind her. He turns to bear down on her without hesitation but with his eyes squinted half-closed, tracking her roughly by shape in the blinding light.

She sweeps his legs from under him. He falls! Knowing he'd be as fast as an eel to get back on his feet, Emma drives her sword down through his chest... and sees his arms cross in an odd gesture before he vanishes in a cloud of feathers.

It's more instinct than skill that lets her spin to catch the shinobi behind her, stops his blade a hair's breadth away from slicing into her neck.

She blocks the attack but is driven back by it, scrambling and clumsy as he presses his advantage; he scores a deep cut along her forearm.

But as she backs up and he stalks forwards her with the feral grace of an apex predator, she sees movement at the top of the shadowed staircase. If it’s Isshin – he could help. If it’s Kuro – maybe he can talk down the situation, but Emma thinks things might be too far gone for that.

Emma is bleeding from cuts on her shoulder and arm, struggling to keep her breath even. She’s sure now she’ll lose in a straight duel. With grim resolve, she keeps his back to the doorway and her expression steady as she makes out a shape too tall to be Kuro in the doorway.

White yukata. It is Isshin, but she can’t see what he’s doing without taking her attention away from the shinobi and she doesn’t dare.

Her world narrows to impressions registered in fractions of a second: parry a strike, counter-attack, evade, try for a throw that she hopes against hope could disarm him; don't do anything to acknowledge the sight of Isshin stepping out onto the rooftop.

He is holding something that makes no sense to her for several long seconds. Not a sword. A firearm.

Emma makes space between herself and her opponent, changes her grip so she can wield her sword one-handed and closes back in with a long vertical cut, following up with a quick series of attacks to keep his attention. He parries them each neatly; she catches his blade between the sword in her right hand and its scabbard in her left.

She's tried to get him off balance this way before and it's failed at that; but it only failed while she was fighting alone. Never mind that it leaves her position weaker than his. The goal is just to keep him still.

And - a gunshot rings out behind her - the shinobi stumbles, unnaturally red eyes widening - Isshin fires a second time - he snarls and spins to face the doorway with an almost animal scream of outrage.

He has left his back to Emma.

This is our chance, Emma thinks, no emotion in her at that moment. She drives her sword through his back until it hits bone and stops. The second rib from the bottom on the right of his ribcage, she thinks. Her blade is trapped. For a second she thinks she's wasted their single chance to catch the Shura off guard, and grabs him by the hair with one hand and angles the sword a little downwards with the other and manages to run him straight through.

The long-trained habit of returning to a stable stance after a strike has her step back from the thrust, almost before her mind’s processed the situation. No longer impaled, his body topples forward, blood hardly visible against the red of his haori. 

Through the whole battle, malice and bloodlust were thick in the air around him; he felt possessed by rage. Fallen in a sprawl on his front on the floor, the shinobi looks like Kuro's wolf, the man she remembers, someone she knows again.

She has just stepped back, one hand reaching up to see how deep the cut on her arm is, when she sees pink light shine around the body lying on the floor. The shinobi twitches, neck muscles spasming. His mechanical hand reaches, shuddering, up from the floor.

Of course. The dragon's heritage. She’s always been curious to see it at work first person.

Too bad she can’t risk letting it get any further.

Emma drives the sword Isshin had entrusted to her through his heart. It is both easier and harder than she would have imagined to very deliberately execute someone this way: the operation is not unlike setting a tent peg in place in hard ground. The difference is mostly in the sound of blunt trauma to flesh and bone.

This is necessary, Emma tells herself. He was becoming Shura. If we do not stop him here who can tell how many more he would kill. It is true that there is a lack of dignity in how she has just treated his half-resurrected body, but she herself has always found the samurai fussiness about such things foolish. Death is death is a simple fact of the cycle of life.

Emma is used to demanding discipline of herself in doctorly moments of crisis, so she reaches out and checks her sword is pinning the shinobi fast to the wooden floor of the lookout post before letting herself exit that panic-state of temporary calm in the face of terror. She staggers back and collapses to her knees. Her breath was already unsteady from the drawn-out fight, and now it goes shallow with panic. Her nails are digging into her palms, which are tender and painful from the desperate, too-tight grip she's held on her weapon in however many minutes it's been that she's been fighting for her life.

"Steady," she hears.

Isshin. He is on the other side of the shinobi’s body from her now, kneeling with one knee up and one down to pick up the shinobi's two swords. He holds both weapons out to her, one bare metal and the other still sheathed.

In general, Emma doesn’t offer anyone her unthinking obedience, even the man who made the Ashina clan what it is. When it comes to medicine Isshin will defer to her unless she goes after his right to roam his territory freely, and in everyday matters they’ll debate one another like idle scholars. When it comes to the ways of war, though, she is his humble student.

She takes the blades and shifts how she's sat, tucking her toes under her so she'd be able to stand in a moment if need be. She looks between him and the body on the floor. 

"That Sekiro’s master – Owl.” Isshin says, one hand on the hilt of his sword. “He was here."

Emma nods, then asks softly: “Kuro?”

“Eyes peeled, student. Don’t you see that shadow there in the doorway?”

She hasn’t looked back at the doorway since she heard him fire that gun. 

“Come out, boy!" Isshin calls. "How much did you see of that?”

Kuro steps out, wide-eyed and white-faced. Emma tries to think of anything remotely comforting she could say and draws a blank. He’s old for his age, but he’s still a boy. A boy who probably saw her kill the only person he whole-heartedly trusted.

“Wolf…” Kuro says, voice thin with distress. “He was becoming a Shura. The Dragon’s Heritage corrupted him.” 

Isshin shakes his head. “That risk was there as soon as he picked up a blade, little lordling. Not something that came from the dragon's power. Maybe what you asked of him sped up his journey down it, maybe you just let him live long enough to travel it. No point in wondering.”

“But...”

“The world will find plenty of blame to lay at your feet, don’t seek out extra.”

Kuro nods reluctantly. Emma's eyes keep shifting back to the shinobi's body, which is not quite still, fingers and throat twitching oddly at odd moments. The dragon’s gift, still trying to do its work.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

She was asking Isshin, but Kuro answers. “I must still break the binding of immortality. That is my duty to this land, with or without Wolf. Will you help me?”

Emma looks at Isshin. Isshin shakes his head, the touch of a smile at his lips. “What, this rickety old man? Ask if the brave and wise doctor here believes in your mission, and if she does, I’ll hole up somewhere and survive without her for a while.”

Kuro looks up at her. There’s something so sincere in his young face; Emma wants to look away.

“I…” Can’t even imagine anything outside these few minutes right now, but... “Yes. I will help you where I can.”

Kuro bows. “Thank you, Lady Emma.”

Isshin rises, circling around the little group with his eyes on the rooftops around them. Comes back to stand at Emma’s shoulder.

“Then we need to gather our things and leave, before the Owl gets back. But that this one’s not quite laid to rest yet, I don’t think.”

Kuro nods, quick and unhappy.

“… Wolf. You have foresworn your oath to me, and so I take back the gift of the Dragon’s Heritage."

And there is no sign of light or petals or the scent of sakura to show his words change anything, but the body on the floor takes on the stillness of death at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the Shura ending gives us that extremely good moment of brave reluctant hero Emma stepping out into a fight she's totally outclassed for, and i'm gonna take that moment and run with it.
> 
> (one day i will write our sad ninja protagonist doing anything other than getting killed in boss fights maybe but APPARENTLY THIS IS NOT THAT FIC)


	2. Chapter 2

The day before, if someone had asked how Emma felt about that odd hermit sculptor in the dilapidated temple, she would have said something polite about how he had been kind to her in her youth.

Arriving at the temple exhausted with her clothes stained in blood, she sees his back to the door and hears the _snck, snck_ sound of his wood-carving, and she realises the hungry child he once fed is still there in the back of her mind and feels an animal comfort in his presence.

Normally there’s so many other thoughts jostling for attention ahead of that child-instinct that she doesn’t even realise it’s still there, but today she is worn down to the bare bones of her self. She rushes over, then doesn’t know what to do with herself when she’s standing in front of him.

“Emma?” he asks.

She hears “sir, forgive our intrusion,” at the door in a boyish voice and then: “Sekijo. Still alive, I see.”

The sculptor – Orangutan, she still thinks of him as – ignores both, sets his carving down to give her his full attention.

“What happened?”

By way of answer, Emma sets the shinobi’s two swords down in front of him.

He looks up, shocked.

“Owl was plotting against us all.” Isshin says, coming to join them. “I didn’t hear what he said to make the wolf turn on his little lord here. Doesn’t really matter though. I don’t reckon it would have worked out well for the old bastard even if Emma and I weren’t there to intervene. Sekiro had nothing but rage in his eyes.”

“Oh Emma.” Orangutan says. “I hoped you’d never be asked to test that resolve of yours... I’m glad you survived.”

“Not just survived.” Isshin says. “You did well.”

Which may be true, but isn’t the point.

The sculptor waves them in the direction of the temple’s little storage space to pull out tatami mats and a rug, then has them stow the incense and books they brought from the castle away under the floorboards, pretending it’s because they’re clutter when really he’s wary of the place being searched.

They bought themselves time on the way out here by blocking the secret passageway to the castle off behind them, but Owl’s still out there, and Genichiro’s unaccounted for too. Emma wonders what is happening on its other side as Kuro very solemnly follows her instructions to bandage the cuts down her arms. Isshin leans against a wall, turning the Mortal Blade in its scabbard over in his hands. The rhythm of Orangutan’s carving is off; he is troubled.

Kuro picks up a book and curls up with it once she’s been tended to, but Emma can’t settle down. She feels full of an odd, manic, almost desperate energy, and it drives her out into the darkness of the temple grounds.

The night air is still, the snow landing soft on her face like a blessing. Emma steps through the snowfall and enjoys the crunch of it under her shoes as she walks away from the light and the sound of the others. There’s contentment to find in the snow and the night calm, and it lasts until she’s on the other side of the little clearing from the temple and the way she twisted her ankle oddly in the fight earlier has started to be hurt even when she isn’t putting weight on that foot.

She settles down against a tree, trailing fingers through the snow and then curling up and hugging her knees.

The shinobi, dead on the floor. Kuro’s expression as he asked for her help, sure that she’s got influence worth asking for. Isshin’s eyes on her as they packed up to leave the castle, how she’d seen something proud in them, something considering.

She’s changed in Kuro’s mind from an incidentally helpful neighbour to a part of his plan. Isshin seems like he’s shifting his own position to the sidelines, stepping back and seeing what plans others make.

She’d long since proved herself to Isshin as a doctor and spy, and it amused him to teach her the Ashina sword style. She’s always been exacting in her standards for herself, and he’d enjoyed knowing his neat and proper retainer would be able to face down most of his court in the dojo.

It had always stayed a… very theoretical kind of knowledge.

* * *

Emma sleeps more deeply than she’d expected to in the crowded temple and wakes to see Kuro awake in front of the one golden Buddha statue. His eyes are closed, hands loose in his lap. Orangutan has shuffled a little off from his usual spot in front of the central altar, as if put off from his carving by the idea of someone actually using the temple for prayer.

Isshin is nowhere to be seen.

Emma’s feet had started out on their own towards the little stream in the woods to wash up and eating breakfast, but a prickle of unease in her mind makes her turn back towards the temple. This is no time to wander off. She would have thought he’d realise that.

Maybe he had, though. The freshest footprints in the snow are heading down to the passage they’d walked up from the castle.

She sets off at a run for the secret passage, following a trail of footsteps by someone with a longer stride than her. When she gets near the doorway, it is pitch black: if Isshin came this way, he did not stop to light the candles along his way.

She didn’t see any footprints leading _back out._

Emma step deeper into the darkness, one hand running along the wall. It is silent. This isn’t a long way from the surface, but the sound of birdsong at the dawn doesn’t reach this far into the earth.

When it feels like she must be near the end of the tunnel, her hand brushes something warm and soft instead of rock and she startles, biting her lip painfully to stop herself making noise.

“Emma.” Isshin’s voice is very nearly too quiet to make out. He rests a hand on her shoulder, she thinks in in order to figure out where her ear is so he can lean closer.

“Seemed like our friend Owl probably knows this passageway. Seemed worth guarding it, and getting the drop on anyone who might think they’re getting the drop on us.”

“How long have you been down here?”

“Don’t fuss over me. You needed the rest. But be quieter than that: about twenty minutes ago, someone started trying to pull apart the door. Listen for it.”

The two of them listen in the dark there. At first Emma can’t make anything out, then she hears a steady _scrape, scrape, scrape, scratch_ , like someone delicately sawing away at something and then readjusting their angle.

“What will you going to do?” Emma asks, once the sound has become familiar.

“They’re trying to be quiet, so they’ll take hold of the door when they break through. That’ll be the moment. The other side to this section is in the cellar; if he’s not alone, he’ll at least be out of earshot of most of the castle.”

She nods, then remembers he can’t see and taps a finger twice on his wrist.

He signals to her to move to the other side of the tunnel.

It feels like hours pass as the two of them wait in the darkness. It’s probably not long: the scratching at the hidden doorway gets louder and louder, and then light starts to shine through one side as the hinges holding the contraption closed slide.

At last there’s a grunt – a man’s voice, gruff but quiet – and what seems like a blinding light as the door rises up off its hinges, then more as the figure turns to set his burden down. Isshin darts in; the great broad-shouldered figure of Owl twists more quickly than such a huge man should be able to and manages to get the bulk of the door between him and the incoming blade.

Emma steps close, the stiletto knife that lives in her parasol in one hand. She cuts the tie holding Owl’s sword to his side and tosses the sheathed weapon behind her into the darkness.

Without ever looking away from his struggle with Isshin, the old shinobi master slams his elbow back towards her face. Emma’s head hits with the wall behind her; she can’t see for a minute.

The fight is fast and brutal: Owl has sheer force and a dozen dirty tricks; Isshin has speed and a sword and precision. Emma spends dozens of long seconds watching the two vie for the upper hand, trying to figure out how to tilt the balance in her favour.

Owl’s braid whips through the air, and she catches it, pivots neatly on her heels, and sweeps him over her hip towards the ground. Owl has clearly learned how to land from a fall: he turns in the air so as to get back on his feet quickly, but Isshin follows him. As he lands on his side, one hand braced against the ground ready to spring back up to his feet, the edge of Isshin’s sword is already held to his throat.

“You lose, you old bastard,” Isshin says. “Woulda thought you’d know better to want immortality.”

Owl hisses in anger, but can’t get his feet back under him without slicing his throat open. He raises his hands – _I yield._ Isshin does not acknowledge the gesture.

“You only think you don’t because you’re operating on the delusion your name will live forever.” Owl says with a laugh. There’s a manic edge to it. “Your clan might even die out before you do, now. Your heir’s run off in disgrace, your little prisoner’s slipped his lease.”

Isshin’s eyes narrow. Emma realises he is about to kill the Hirata spymaster. She can’t find any clear reason to argue against it: Owl betrayed them.

“Do you know where Genichiro went?” she asks. Owl lowers his hands back to his sides.

“Sent him down a false trail. He’s too easy to pull around by the sense of pride, that boy.” And with a glance from Emma to Isshin: “You were too soft with him.”

“I’m not interested in a single word from your mouth, shinobi. If Emma has questions to ask you, you can answer her without colour commentary.”

“Not interested? You don’t even want to hear where to find the last key for the incense the boy’s mixing up?” Owl says, but as he mentions incense, Emma sees a movement of his hand, a tiny surreptitious motion.

Isshin must see it too. He slits Owl’s throat, such a small and precise movement Emma doesn’t register what’s happened until there’s blood running down the shinobi’s front and Isshin’s crouched down and forcing the shinobi’s limp hand open.

Nothing in it. In his pockets, some kind of custom explosives.

“Fool. I know a man like you doesn’t trust the world enough to keep something like that branch out of your own sight,” he tells the corpse. 

* * *

Kuro is sat outside the temple when they emerge back into the sunlight. He looks up happily, as if he’s been waiting for them, then frowns as he registers blood and grim expressions. Emma hands him a cherry-blossom branch, but doesn’t know what to say about its provenance. Isshin ignores the boy and heads off towards the stream behind the temple.

“Is this… a sprig from the everblossom?”

“So Owl thought, or at least, wanted us to think he thought.”

“Owl…” Kuro says.

“Dead.” Emma replies. “He wanted to ambush us from the passageway to Ashina Castle. Lord Isshin anticipated that plan.”

“I see.”

And she thinks he does, is the pity – that’s he’s having the same internal struggle she is, of finding it a relief to have a known enemy taken out of the picture permanently but hard to think about her allies setting out deliberately to strike that deathblow.

“Oh, Kuro. You deserve a childhood. One day I’ll go for a walk and bring you back sweets instead of the heads of your enemies or the keys to an ancient mystery.”

“… That… would be nice,” he says, cautious. Thinking, she’s sure, about a ritual that demands his own death.

“It’ll happen. I promise.”

* * *

Isshin is still at the little stream when she arrives there, sat on the stump of a tree she’d helped Orangutan cut down when she’d been seven or eight. He’s examining his wrist, with the start of a deep bruise visible.

“Two toes broken, and a rib cracked. Hmph. Age makes fools of us all.”

She shuts her eyes for a minute, trying to summon the presence of mind to step into her role as doctor.

“Emma. Come here a moment.”

She does, clean hands dripping with ice-cold meltwater.

“I’m glad I taught you my sword style.”

The way he says it seems the start of a thought, not a thought in itself. Emma sits down next to him.

“Genichiro wants to make Ashina great by making himself as strong as I was. He’s got a good heart, but he’s running flat-out on foot trying to keep up with a world that’s started to tame horses. You… you wanted to be able to fight so you could make a world where there’s space to win battles without drawing a sword.”

He’d never asked why she’d asked him to teach her. Perhaps it’s that her mind’s not settled back to calm from the violent start to the morning, but realising she’s been seen that accurately makes a lump in her throat. It had been Orangutan and his struggles that made her want to ask, but that’s the thing, that’s the bigger picture of it, that’s a neat encapsulation of why she’s on Kuro’s side.

“Yeah.” Emma says. “It might be naive, but. Yeah.”

Isshin laughs. “It’s no more naive than me chasing off those rats from the ministry to buy us another few weeks of times and build up another dozen black marks from folks wanting vengeance for their missing men. I’d say less. But it’s a harder line to try and walk than the rest of us have had.”

Emma nods, smoothing her sleeve over her lap. Owl’s blood doesn’t show much on the black fabric.

“Owl’s been lining up this plan for years. You killed Sekiro, who he’d sunk more time grooming for it than I have on any scheme for years. He’s spent his life running assassins and thieves for a house that’s died out; he knows there’s no honest life ahead of him now the Hirata are ruined. The big picture of what you want’s worth pushing for, but I think you knew there was nothing to gain by letting him live other than a poisoned knife in the back down the line.”

Emma looks down, hands neatly joined in her lap. It’s an old habit to school her expression to calm, to hide her emotions. That lesson comes from a very different school-book to the one he’s offering now.

“You’re saying, sometimes you need to kill people to make the world less violent.”

“Eh, that’s for you to judge. You decided the shinobi under the shadow of a demon had to die, you hesistated over the man took him in as a boy to groom into a killer.” Isshin says. “It’s too late in my life to start worrying about dharma. But if you’re going along with this plan of the boy’s, you’ll be asked to answer that question again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> plotting out a little protagonist-Emma narrative arc has been fun for a few reasons, but especially for giving me a reason to write conversations like:
> 
> Emma: so i guess you're saying I should do more murders :/  
> Isshin: nah, you do you. just saying, was Owl any better than a shura if he shaped Sekiro into one, really?  
> Emma: ... i guess it is good to confront the internal contradictions of your own moral system  
> Isshin: i mean, honestly i had a lot of fun just killing everyone, but I think it's sweet the younger generation is trying new things


	3. Chapter 3

“It matches the description exactly!” Kuro’s voice is bright, excited. “The leaves have a line of white in their veins and the buds are a little pinker than a normal cherry flower, just as Takeru’s diary indicated. That means we’ve gathered everything we need for the incense.”

Emma nods, perching beside him on the rough floor. She’s heard parts of this already, but it’s been a complex picture Kuro’s been putting together, changing over time as he researched and the shinobi ventured out and tested theories and brought back new answers and clues. “So what do we… do with it?”

“From what we put together of my predecessor’s writing, burning it and wearing the scent on one's body will let a person travel to the Fountainhead Palace, where the dragon whose gift grants immortality dwells.”

“It’s almost like an old folk tale. Go and fetch these one-of-a-kind artefacts, then burn them up into nothing and pray it’ll work to open a door. It’s like someone’s testing our ability to trust.”

“I suppose it is. I wonder if it’s on purpose. Who knows how a dragon thinks?”

“Or what we’ll see when we get there,” Emma finishes the thought.

“I was thinking about that. Maybe I should be the one to travel there.” Kuro says.

“Lord Kuro. You would be… very much at risk in that place.”

Kuro shakes his head, something a bit like bitterness in his voice. “Would I? When blades can’t cut me?”

“And yet, even my reckless fool grandson managed to keep you captive.” Isshin says, bringing tea over to their corner of the room. A little over-steeped, the way he likes it.

“I’m not going to ask someone else to fight my battles again.” Kuro says.

“Hmph.” Isshin grunts, folding his arms and frowning as he decides a conversational tactic. “Would you call me a coward?”

Kuro is young, but not so young as to think there’s an answer to that question that will work out well for him. He tilts his head and waits for the old man to keep talking.

“When you are in charge of waging a war, part of that responsibility is deciding when you should step onto the battlefield yourself, and when you need to stay back. It’s your duty to know if you’d be putting something bigger than your own life at risk to sooth your pride.”

Kuro scowls, jaw set as if he's trying to decide how to counter the argument. It’s interesting to watch the boy stare the old warlord down. Kuro’s always been shy around Isshin, who the children of Ashina her talked about as a living relic of a more vicious age. Isshin cares about Kuro’s situation in the abstract, but has found the reality of the serious little child mostly irrelevant to the problem of the Dragon’s Heritage.

It’s interesting, but beyond the shallows of this conversation there’s some deep tides of uncertainty to confront. Does Emma really want to make this journey, when she’s still got no answer to Isshin’s challenge, when she’s never left the borders of Ashina?

She wants the dragon’s gift of immortality gone. Ideally, she wants a way to do it without Kuro needing to die. But she’s a doctor and the retainer to a lord and a spy, though, not a wanderer or warrior or shinobi. She has done violence in the last few days and been afraid and been mostly-convinced she’s made the right decision. What she wants now is the time to stop and think and find her footing again.

But even if all those grand principles and ambitions were decided… they barely know how to get to this so-called palace. There’s nothing even near a guarantee she’d be able to find her way back out in one piece. It will have to be a gamble, and the boy is too young and the swordmaster too old and the sculptor too angry to even be an option for this journey. With Ashina falling, Isshin dying, Genichiro missing, there’s no time to wait and craft a perfect plan.

“I will go,” Emma speaks up, breaking the staring contest as Isshin looks at her with a nod and Kuro with hesistation. “I have some skill in moving around unnoticed.”

Across the room, the sound of Orangutan’s carving stops.

“Lady Emma...” Kuro says, his enthusiasm of a minute ago faded. “I am… I would not ask you to take on this burden on my account.”

There’s not really any reassurance she can give that wouldn’t be empty words. He wants to do something nearly impossible; she thinks it’s worth trying, but she won’t be the one to lie to his face and tell him it’ll be easy.

“So the incense needs... this lotus-flower, the branch, dust ground from this stone?” she asks instead.

“And one more ingredient: my blood.”

“Strange recipes, our forebears went for,” she shakes her head. “Give me sandalwood any day.”

“To travel to the Palace, we need my blood.” Kuro says again, without even a smile for her attempt at humour. “To draw it, one of you must cut me with the Mortal Blade, and the act of drawing the Mortal Blade kills the wielder.”

“Huh. Would you be able to cut yourself with it?”

The odachi’s blade is longer than the boy is tall, but it’s not as though he’d need to do more than nick a finger on it, surely.

“I’ve tried to draw the blade, but my hands lock up and my body refuses to move. But even if I could use it myself… from what Lord Takeru and Lady Tomoe wrote, I think if you are to go to the Fountainhead Palace, you should be armed with the ability to kill the undying.”

Thinking through the implications of that makes Emma profoundly uncomfortable, so she falls back on the blunt practicality she can manage.

“You're saying that to break the ties of your divine heritage, we must fetch these dragon’s tears from the Fountainhead Palace. For any of us to go to the Fountainhead Palace, you need to bind someone by your immortal oath so they can draw the blade and cut you.”

Kuro nods.

“And by someone, we’re specifically talking about me.”

Kuro flinches, starts talking: “I haven’t ever wanted to put anyone in the position to die for my sake. It’s wrong. But it seems just as wrong to give up on this path after Wolf and I got so far. But then, that makes me just one more person doing something wrong because they think it’ll let them do something right that’s more important.”

She’d feel very trapped in his situation too, and she’s had another decade and change to get used to the fact the world has very few simple answers.

“I understand your dilemma,” she says to cut through his fretting to reframe things a little. “But take a look at the situation from my eyes. It is my duty as a doctor to cure the sick, and until Ashina is rid of these various curses of immortality, the land and its people will not regain its strength.”

Kuro blinks at her. She smiles a little at his confusion.

“What I’m saying is that we have a common cause here. I would not die for your sake, but we both believe in putting an end to immortality. Is that a strong enough tie between the two of us for you to… use for this?”

He considers it a minute, and eventually nods: “Yes. It should be.”

Speaking just for herself, Emma wants there to be absolutely no ambiguity about the state of her mortality: the thought of offering up her life to this old relic of a sword is terrifying even with a promise that she’ll rise from the dead afterwards. But this moment seems fragile. She swallows her worries as Kuro steps towards her with an air of ritual.

“Lady Emma… For such time as thou sharest my will to sever the ties of immortality, I grant thee the power of resurrection.”

He’s holding something between two fingers, like a gemstone the colour of cherry blossom. It is cold against her skin as he reaches up to sets his a hand on her forehead. “Take my blood and live again.”

The hair on the back of her neck stands up at that. She wonders if anyone has ever made notes on the physiological properties of the phenomenon known as the dragon’s heritage; it’s hard to tell if she’s sensing some strange force at work or just doing that human thing of imagining significance all around her the moment she starts to look it.

The stone – blood – thing dissolves away, leaving his touch warm against her skin.

“And now you could study the dragon’s heritage, if you wanted,” he says, voice deliberately light. “You’d never be able to publish it without giving someone some more terrible ideas about how to make their own even-more-corrupt version… But if we manage this, no-one else will ever manage that again.”

Humans will find dozens of reasons to wage war without that specific motive, she’s sure, but his optimism is contagious all the same.

“I won’t write a treatise on it, but how _does_ what you just did work?” she asks, reaching up to touch the spot on her forehead where Kuro rested his hand. “I spoke to your Wolf about some of the effects of the dragon’s heritage, but not about the specifics of what it does. Bring a person back from death, yes, but when, and how, and in what condition?”

“I’m not sure. I know that if you die now, you will be resurrected where you lie,” Kuro says, which the part she’s got already. “But the only times I saw it happen were when I first brought Wolf back, and yesterday on the roof.”

She wondered if he didn’t know because he’d never asked the shinobi what it was like to die and come back, or if he’d asked but the shinobi had refused to answer.

It doesn’t really matter. She has decided to do this, so she will do it.

Emma picks the Mortal Blade up with appropriate formality. Isshin moves closer from his incline against the wall.

The sword is old and even heavier than you’d expect such a long blade to be, the guard shaped into an open flower by beautiful detailwork. Without allowing herself to stop and think about what she’s doing, Emma changes her grip and starts to draw the blade. There is something red rising from its edge like smoke, and her grips feels weak, and –

Isshin is at her elbow, catching her weight. The sword slips from her hands as her vision blurs. It’s not like him, Emma thinks distantly, to let a priceless artefact fall like that.

She comes back to herself disoriented; she’s lying on her back and there’s three faces looking at her, each with a different mix of curiosity and concern. Kuro moves towards her as she pulls herself up to a sitting position, as if he wants to touch her and make sure she has a pulse. She wonders if he ever saw the shinobi die and be brought back.

There’s still a little of the frailty that had made her drop the old odachi to her hands when she flexes them, but it’s clear the blade does nothing so simple as just physical harm to its would-be bearer. It is more as if it detached her sense of self from herself.

She shudders, remembering the sight of the blade’s edge bleeding red out through the air, remembers how she had not been able to take her eyes away from it and how as she looked deeper into it she’d felt as if she was starting to _understand_ the sight, starting to see what it meant and how dreadful the meaning was.

It is a trap for the mind, and trying to understand it is a trap too. The blade has done its worst and she is still here. Emma stands, keeping her eyes up as if she were facing down a foe, not stopping to think long enough for it to get a grip on her. She draws the blade in a single confident motion.

She has taken up the Mortal Blade and lived to tell the tale. Now to take a blood sample, like the good physician she is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takeru's diary: burn this stuff and then go hang out in the creepiest place in Ashina with that smoke on your clothes  
> Everyone: cool great, lets set off on that fetch quest immediately
> 
> (DS1 protagonist, muttering in the distance: kids these days, don't know how lucky they've got it, back in my day we walked uphill through a poison swamp both ways with nothing to go on at all except 'two bells, one up, one down'...)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emma goes on an adventure.

She does not leave that day: Isshin takes her aside to share what he knows of Tomoe’s lightning arts, and Orangutan to teach her tricks a noble’s valued courtly doctor does not learn that the shinobi of the sunken valleys do. She gets zapped by lightning, which is somehow actually _less_ terrifying than slamming herself face-first into a tree trying to use the spring-loaded grapple tool Orangutan apparently built into her parasol while she was out. She ends the day feeling deeply aware of all the things she doesn’t know.

“Emma…” the sculptor says later, sat out in the evening to watch the sunset. He scratches his chin, grasping for a phrase, then shakes his head. “You’re set on this, then?”

“I am.” Emma says. “Scared, too, but it’s important, to make this happen. Kuro’s plan benefits everyone: Ashina’s people, the soldiers, the lands around us. We thought we could set the shinobi up with freedom to carry out his master’s will, but we… miscalculated.”

“I don’t see why it’s got to be you to go, though. The old bastard over there must have dozens of men who’d jump of a cliff for him and be glad to be asked. Hell, I bet that menace could still beat up everyone in this mysterious palace himself, if push came to shove.”

“Wolf – Sekiro – did kill a lot of his people” Emma says _._

“Hmph. And I always thought of Isshin as such a crafty bastard. Nice to know that sometimes he even outsmarts himself.”

Emma just shrugs. She’s never sure how much of his animosity to the oldest living Ashina is real, but while she’d never really gotten on with Lord Gyoubu and the rest, she’s still shaken to see so many of them dead..

“Well, I’ve got an old bottle of sake stashed under the floorboards back there. Oblige this old fool and keep me company for a drink?”

* * *

The journey starts out well enough: Kuro’s trail of literary clues had found out the right place to seek out with the incense, and she’s always been good at moving around unnoticed. Granted she normally does it by blending into a crowd, rather than lurking in the shadows carrying an ancient sword that’s nearly as tall as her. Thinking outside the box is important, though. She’s innovating.

She’s… just starting to feel a little grain of confidence when she reaches the cave and its palanquin. And then a giant rope-totem figure reaches down with one massive hand and scoops it up, fabric frame and her inside it all.

Maybe it shouldn’t have seemed like a total break with reality. After all, yesterday she’d died and woken up again. But there had been no _drama_ to that death: Kuro looks more like a serious young boy than a dragon’s descendent, and she could easily have been waking up from a faint. Intellectually she’d believed him, but it hadn’t sunk in.

Now she that she finds herself standing at the edge of a cliff that the giant palanquin-bearer is resting on. She may as well be in another world to the one she knows. It’s breathtaking; a sense of awe underlaid with the crawling realisation that she has no way to turn back now even if she wanted to.

Maybe the rope-totem will carry her back again. Maybe she can clamber back down its body. But if she leaves now, the ingredents all used, they would have failed and she’d never be able to turn back and try again.

Emma turns from the astonishing view of the world below and looks towards the bridge leading off the cliff edge into the Fountainhead Palace proper. It is serene and lovely, lined by maple trees.

It’s also… unfortunately secure. As far as she can see from this side of it, there’s no way to get over there that doesn’t leave her in an easy sightline of anyone guarding from the buildings on the other side. Nothing for it but to cross, then. She’s almost exactly half way across when a figure leaps over the gate to block her way.

Emma stops respectfully still, hands together.

“Honoured guardian, I come as a gue-”

This overture is summarily turned down; the rejection is delivered in the form of a naginata aimed at her face. Emma dodges around the back of the huge figure in monk’s clothing and past it, making frantic dash for the gate on the other side of the bridge in the hope it won’t have too many other defenders.

She hears a deep laugh behind her – she thinks the voice is a woman’s, but it’s also _far too close_ – and she turns too late to block the almost lazy-looking arc her opponent cuts. The blade digs into the flesh of her shoulder.

It really, really hurts, but she can still move her arm. Emma draws her sword, grits her teeth, turns to fight.

Everyone back at the temple is trusting her with this. She will see it through.

* * *

Day and night do not seem to pass the same in the Fountainhead Palace as they did in the world below. Emma’s sense of time would have ended up skewed even if it had: she’d asked the shinobi what it was like to die and be revived, and he’d never given her a real answer so she didn’t know how he’d found it, but for her, the resurrection power seems to shake her sense of her own body.

The mind remembers the tension and fear and exertion of fighting. he body is rendered whole again, but somehow drained. Emma, whatever Emma really is at the heart of her, feels distant from the both, as if she’s watching herself from a distance, drifting slowly out of focus.

It is not easy, but she kills the laughing monk and the great centipede inside it. On the other side of the bridge, the people of the Fountainhead Palace go about their everyday lives in their beautiful half-fallen world. She has better luck avoiding them than she had their sinister gatekeeper, and she almost enjoys clambering around rooftops to get by unnoticed. It works, and she doesn’t want to fight them; she leaves them in peace except for the packs of terrifying life-draining nobles.

Eventually, she finds her way to some kind of place of worship at the heart of the strange land, and crouching down beside it to touch the stone brings her to an even stranger world inside this already very alien one.

She is in a fog-shrouded land in front of an ancient tree, and the tree is watched over by decaying dragonish-creatures.

They move in on her and they feel _wrong_ like the Shura-demon shinobi and the life-stealing nobles. She does not try to make peace before she cuts them down. She just fights and feels ever more distant from herself in this faded landscape, like she only exists in this moment of violence in this unreal space. Killing them seems to her like she is cauterising a wound: they blow away as clouds of ash when they die.

And then the last of them falls, and a storm arcs around the ancient cherry tree, and the tree itself rises up. It unfolds into an unearthly and beautiful being, the cherry-tree dragon, Ashina’s distant haphazard benefactor.

Even though its choices have cast a plague over Ashina and caused wars, Emma can not bring herself to believe that it would be righting a wrong to harm this creature.

It roars, calling a whirlwind down that flings her away backwards. She skids back in an awkward crouch, frozen in indecision. Had she harmed it by killing the corrupted guardians? Is it a thinking being? Can she make a request of it? She doesn’t want to raise a weapon against a god-spirit, but it may be the duty she has taken on needs her to.

It looms over her, raising a huge jade sword.

For some reason, it’s the fact it’s holding a weapon that lets her regain her calm.

Death is the worst that could happen by trying for peace: today, that’s reassuring.

Instead of trying to get back to her feet as its whirlwind fades back to calm, Emma kneels, tucking her feet underneath her properly. She places the Mortal Blade and her own katana on her right side in an expression of peaceful intent. She folds her hands together in her lap: not a gesture of prayer of meditation, just the kind of polite attention one might give a dinner guest.

The dragon rears up to strike above her, its body twisting like the coils of a snake.

Emma holds herself still, keeping her expression as calm as she can in the hope of tricking her body into the same state. The hairs on the back of her neck know she is not safe, though. They stand on end as she awaits its next move.

The sword slams down just inches to her right.

Her fingernails dig into the palms of her hands with the effort not to flinch. She breathes in and then out once more. The dragon is bending its long neck down closer to her. It’s too huge to really comprehend: she struggles to see the face as a face.

She considers bowing to it, but it has brought suffering to Ashina. Whether it was a deliberate act or not, she will show respect, but not make a gesture of submission.

They watch one another in silence, her and this ancient thing, and after a long moment, it opens its huge maw and breathes out. The world fades to white around her.

Emma shakes her head to clear her vision, and then realises it _has_ cleared, but the things around her have changed: the white mist has was clinging to the floor in the dragon’s landscape is all around her now.

The flute music of those sickly dragon-tree-people drifts through the air, but she doesn’t see any sign of them.

Her swords are still set on the mist-shrouded floor beside her. There is a slice cut out of her kimono sleeve where the dragon’s sword fell. The dragon is out of sight, but that’s not saying much: even her feet seem a little hazy.

She turns in a slow circle.

Behind her is Kuro. He holds his own severed head in his hands.

“Thank you for assisting with the beheading,” it says through blue lips.

“Ah.” the shinobi – Wolf, Sekiro, maybe better called Shura for the undercurrent of heat in his voice – says, looping an arm around her shoulder. It cuts off her breathing. “So you could do it, in the end.”

He draws a finger across her neck, the symbolic decapitation very clear. Embers drift through the air from his hand.

“I hate you a little for that, actually,” he continues, more words than she ever heard him string together in life. “For just preferring to keep your own hands clean, and realising I’d obediently trot along the path you wanted if you just nudged me to keep me there. We could have done this _together_. You could have kept me company with all that pain and anger.”

Emma remembers being caught in the coils of that corrupted monk’s parasite grasp, dying and terrified. Emma remembers reviving and feeling weak and slow and faint of heart and tired, and having to still stand up and fight and try to win again.

The shinobi had never asked for any help from her except her wisdom a doctor. But then, she supposed nothing in his life would have given him reason to think he could.

“Yes. I think perhaps I should have.” Emma says, and her voice is rough. Kuro’s head watches her from its cradle in his arms, with something like suspicion.

“… Honoured dragon. These two are both connected to your bloodline. Is that why I see them now?”

The mouth of Kuro’s severed head twitches upwards a little.

“Honoured?” it asks, with a bitterness she’s never heard in his voice in reality.

Sekiro laughs, still behind her but no longer close enough to be threatening. The laugh seems oddly echoed, and a second and third and fourth shinobi step in from outside her field of view, all holding unsheathed blades.

None of them have flames burning in their eyes, but there’s something off about their faces.

“All this power does…” they say together, and as they move closer she sees the others are rotting and decaying, crawling with insects, “Is leach life from the land.”

Emma swallows. She can’t help but imagine that as her own flesh. But this puts her back on familiar territory now: the dragon is talking about what are they trying to do, not what has she failed at.

“Yes. The bearer of your heritage wishes to end the influence your power has on humans. We can be vicious creatures, and greedy. We war. We’ve kept Lord Kuro a prisoner with no-one to trust other than the shinobi who is sworn to obey his word, and we kept the shinobi a servant who’s only been taught to solve problems by killing.”

“And so you want to solve this problem with another death,” Kuro’s head says.

“I… Lord Kuro wants to end this. Even at the cost of his life.”

“And so you will bind yourself to him, and learn to kill for him, and what, just hope that maybe _this_ time a few more deaths are all that’s needed?”

The accusation hits home: Emma doesn’t think that, not really. It’s just that their plans were just overturned so quickly, and there’s been no time to try and correct course.

“So what are your plans, then?” She demands, “It’s your curse, your gift, your plague, your secrets. Tell us how to bring about the end of your influence without hurting your heir. Some of us are selfish, us humans, but if we could see how to do better _we would!_ ”

She shouts the end of that claim, and her voice echoes as she does, even though there’s nothing for it to echo off.

There’s a very distant peal of thunder, and then such a deep silence it feels almost uncanny, as if the land itself has stilled to listen to her.

The Kuro-figure steps towards her and as it does she realises it now has a head again, a head with the boy’s gentle expression and a dragon’s proud set of horns. The human head is still in its hands, a tear on its pallid cheek.

The dragon-headed boy leans up towards her and she leans down to listen as it whispers. “Find the artificial immortal.”

And with that  Emma wakes. She’s  at the foot of the old stone memorial, lying  beside  the  smooth  stone body of  an unknown other woman .

The sleeve of her kimono is still missing a slice of cloth. Cupped in the palm of the other, there is something that looks like water, sparkling bright with reflections of objects that don’t exist in the world around her. A dragon’s tears.


	5. Chapter 5

It is dusk when she steps out from the ancient cave in the Mibu Village, legs shaky at the descent from Fountainhead Palace. She should probably stop and sleep somewhere, but she knows the way back, picks her way back through the occupied lands around Ashina to Orangutan’s temple as the last of the light fades.

It’s comforting to see that familiar old building by its dim candlelight, but seeing it makes it _matter_ all at once that she couldn’t say whether it’s been nearer three days or three weeks since she set off from here.

Has Orangutan dropped his guard around the man who once cut his arm off? Has Kuro explored the world around the temple?

She… could really do some downtime herself. As soon as she steps inside, it’ll be time to start talking. She can’t even think how she’ll explain what she’s seen and done and what she thinks it means for them all.

Emma shrugs the pack she’s been carrying off her shoulder and sets the two swords she’s carrying down carefully, then lets herself fall backwards into the snow. It’s good to be back. Birds calling in the night, snow melting away against her eyelids and lips. Her breath slowing down, becoming soft.

Hanbei is the one who finds her. She hears a crunch of steps in snow and opens her eyes to find him heading towards the temple, a pot of tea in one hand and set of simple cups in the other.

He startles as she sits up - “Lady Emma? Were you… sleeping outside?”

It… does seem to be dawn now.

“It’s been an odd few days,” Emma says, by way of half-answer, brushing snow off her clothes and picking up her belongings. “Or has it? How long has it been since lord Kuro and Isshin arrived?”

But Hanbei isn’t looking at her. “The – that sword!”

Oh. Of course.

“The Mortal Blade,” she acknowledges. “The tales seem to be true: it has killed some immortal beings.”

He asks her to grant her the same ‘gift’, of course. Calls her good doctor and appeals to her duty not to let her patients suffer.

Patients have asked Emma to kill them before. It is never an easy request to hear, but she finds it harder now: she can’t help but remember the shinobi, pinned to the floor like a beetle, twitching as the dragon’s power tried to bring him back.

“Hanbei.” She puts her a hand on his shoulders, as if touch will get across that she isn’t taking his pain lightly. “I promised to help Kuro sever the ties of immortality. I believe we can do it. We have some ideas, but what we need next is to understand what the Senpou monks did to men like you... Would you come to that temple with us, and help us?”

He looks down. “Lady Emma. I failed my lord, and I’d just fail you too.”

“I’m not asking you to fight,” Emma says, as she as she can be without giving up ground. “I’m asking you to let me be a doctor, and learn how to heal an infection instead of just cutting it out.”

He laughs bitterly, turning his arm palm side up to show her how deep his unhealed wounds are. “Don’t go on a fool’s errand for me. I’m long overdue for death’s grasp.”

“Perhaps. But we can learn from one victim of a plague how better to treat the next, you know. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a favour that I’m asking for – for you to let us learn from you, even though it’s not you it’ll help.”

“Hmph.” He stamps from foot to foot in the snow as if he’s cold, even though she knows he sleeps outside and does not feel it. “It’s only a favour if it’s freely given, lady doctor. If I say no, would you end this curse of mine?”

“I would.” Emma says, reluctantly. “Yes. I’d hate the world a little for it, but if the only thing you want from this world is to move onto the next, then yes.”

Hanbei eyes her closely, as trying to decide if she means it.

She holds his gaze, and after a long moment, he shakes his head and laughs. “What’s the world coming to, eh? A sweet lady like you more willing to kill someone than this battered old soldier?”

She laughs. “Either that or I’m just better at bluffing than you.”

“Ha! Fine, fine. I’m not convinced this isn’t a wild goose chase you’re on, but what the hell, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do out here. I’ll follow you, lady Emma.”

They’ll need more tea than Hanbei is carrying before she’s finished explained her journey to everyone, and longer still to decide on their next steps. But Emma feels a glimmer of hope in her chest.

They’ll find this Divine Child, and they’ll bring all their knowledge and courage and little shreds of hopes for a better world together, and perhaps, eventually, they’ll change things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole game I hoped we'd get a chance to invite Hanbei in out of the snow, but noooo, only murder-centric interactions for this sweet doofus.
> 
> Thank you for following this very niche AU. As a lover of desolate worlds and big dramatic boss fights, the middle part of the game where there's so many fights with people who are just doing their god damn job and where apparently there's noooo other way to solve that kite puzzle than MURDER AND MIND CONTROL, and there's no way to be kind back to Hanbei bothered me... Stop making this bleaker than it needs to be, Sekiro, you dumbass.
> 
> So this is partly "hell yeah I'll take that opportunity for protagonist!Emma" and partly "but, I do believe in the power of friendship!!!". I woudln't dare to make this setting fully bright and hopeful but I enjoyed writing it with juuust a little more potential for our various waifs and strays to make connections. Thank you for reading! <3


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